When Dutch Country Table announced fried mush would be on their breakfast menu when they opened in April, some of us scrunched our noses. Fried mush? Sounds bad. Why would anyone want to eat that?

Those of you who are familiar are no doubt used to this reaction. To you, it’s this nostalgic favorite that you’ll eat with maple syrup and bacon, or tomato gravy and liverwurst. You might go years without eating it, and then you’ll gleefully seize the opportunity when it pops up at a fundraiser meal or is on the menu of a new restaurant.

To those of us who don’t know what you’re talking about, fried mush doesn’t make any sense. You start with hot cereal like oatmeal, pour it into a loaf pan and chill like flan, slice it into slabs like Spam, and sizzle it on the stovetop until you get hash browns made of corn. What?!?

It turns out fried mush is a fascinating piece of Iowa food history. It contains our heritage in a bite.

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Just as potatoes sustained the Irish, cornmeal mush sustained early American settlers. The porridge provides incomplete nutrition on its own, but in combination with milk, meat, or fruit, it covers most of the bases. Once the settlers learned about growing corn from Native Americans, they were off to a good start in terms of being able to feed themselves.

In a class that includes other unappetizing-sounding dishes like grits and gruel, fried mush starts with coarse-ground cornmeal boiled slowly in water or milk. Mush-and-milk or mush-and-molasses might be lunch or dinner; the leftovers are then poured into a loaf pan and allowed to set. The gel-like brick is then sliced and pan fried in animal fat or butter; this becomes breakfast when sweetened with sides.

Mush is cheap, filling, and keeps well. Although it goes by other names, Americans have been calling it ‘mush’ since 1671, apparently because they didn’t care for the word ‘porridge.’

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Mush is poverty food. Although America won independence and laid claim to a chunk of the continent, when hard times hit, its people reverted to eating mush.

Over the previous century or so, there were two periods in particular that had folks boiling down their cornmeal: World War I and the Great Depression.

Unlike our British cousins, Americans did not have mandatory food rationing during World War I, but they were urged to reduce their consumption of meat, wheat, fats and sugar. “Food will win the war,” they were told; eat your fruits and vegetables (because those won’t transport well overseas).

Also, have a good meal of fried mush.

“Fried cornmeal mush is another good and substantial breakfast dish ‘which will stay by’ until another meal,” a columnist wrote in The Kalona News, July 1918. “Bits of meat, chopped dried fruit like dates and figs or nuts, are all good to add to it and increase the food value of the dish.”

“Remnants of cereal breakfast foods may often be utilized to make palatable dishes, to thicken soups or other foods,” said the US Department of Agriculture the following month. “The practice of frying the left-overs of boiled hominy or of cornmeal mush is as old as the settlement of this country, and the nursery song about the ‘bag pudding the queen did make’ from King Arthur’s barley meal shows us that for centuries other cereal puddings have been treated in the same way.”

During the Great Depression Americans were in financial trouble, but there was a ton of cheap corn out there (also a problem, as getting as little as 8 cents a bushel bankrupted farmers). Mush was simple, versatile, and inexpensive, making it a staple of the 1930s.

In his “Flint Ridge” column in the 1990s, Don W. Yoder often reflected on his days eating fried mush for local readers.

“Dad used to gather nice big ears of corn from the corncrib and place them in the oven of the ol kitchen range until the corn was well dried, then he would take the corn over to the Wassonville Mill which was powered by a big water wheel and Bill Eash would grind the corn into cornmeal to make cornbread, fried mush or mush and milk. We never got tired of it, which always and still would taste good,” he wrote.

People even had Depression-era fantasies about making fried mush so good, it would earn them a fortune.

In December 1936, the Lone Tree Reporter printed a column entitled, “Happy New Year Mush,” in which a wife is left at home while her husband heads to church as she has no suitable winter coat. A snowstorm ensues, stranding a traveling couple at her house, and for two days all she has to serve them is fried mush with butter and syrup.

When they depart, they order slabs of cornmeal mush from her for their chain of grocery stores, thus solving her family’s financial difficulties “for the year and who knows, maybe forever!”

It was a far-fetched idea, but not impossible. After all, C.W. Jackson & Sons was making mush in their garage and selling it to grocery stores; they’d been doing that for decades. You can still find Jaxon Mush in Hy-Vee stores today.

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The story of mush is also a story of Iowa corn.

In the mid-1800s, Iowa was a wheat state, not a corn state. It was one of the country’s top wheat producers; milled Iowa wheat was even exported to Europe. Grain mills were built along rivers to process the crop, at first powered by water, then later by steam.

Eventually almost every town had a mill. You can see equipment from Kalona’s, which farmers built in 1880, at the Kalona Historical Village, where it demonstrates flour and corn grinding at Kalona Fall Festival.

Iowa wheat took grave hits in the 1880s. Continuous production wore out the land. A severe drought took hold. Chinch bugs and grasshoppers invaded. Left with meager yields, Iowa farmers gave up wheat for corn and oats.

As you know, that worked out. Iowa was the country’s top corn producer in a few years. But it didn’t take long for farmers to discover the most profitable way to process corn was to feed it to hogs.

Today only one percent of Iowa corn grown is for human consumption; the rest is used for animal feed, the production of ethanol, and for manufacturing products like plastics.

In the food world, round millstones – the pride of millers for 2,000 years -- were replaced by more efficient roller mills by 1890. Wet mills followed a bit later. Today, large-scale industrial processors break corn down into its core components, which appear as surprising ingredients in many of our pantry goods: salad dressing, soft drinks, peanut butter.

The shift in cornmeal quality that resulted from these milling changes did not go unnoticed. A writer for the Wellman Advance lamented it in December 1931.

“Good corn meal must be made from sound, whole fresh corn. Most of the corn has been through the germinating plant which removes the corn oil which contains the vitamin B and gives flavor to corn meal. What we usually buy for corn meal is nothing more than ground hominy grits that have as much taste as saw dust,” he wrote. “No wonder corn bread, like mother used to make, corn cakes, fried mush and mush and milk are seldom served anymore.”

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Local folks have never given up on fried mush.

Lynn Chambers exemplified the eager spirit of the midcentury housewife in her May 1951 Kalona News column, in which she provided instructions for making Golden Mush. Husbands and children were skipping breakfast, and Golden Mush served with the right attitude could solve that problem, she argued.

“Could you resist a breakfast that smelled irresistible, looked good and tasted wonderful? Could you pass up a well-balanced meal that someone cooked with enthusiasm, and hummed happily while they did it?” she asked. “No, chances are you couldn’t, and neither will your family if you set this pleasant pace every morning.”

She served Golden Mush with sausage patties, glazed apple slices and hot syrup. You can almost imagine “the family practically tumbling over each other getting to the table.”

In February 1959, the Lone Tree High School Science Club went on a radio program early one morning. The program was called “Fried Mush for Breakfast.” And yes, they did actually have fried mush for breakfast before getting to school on time.

Mary Marek had never eaten fried mush before, but after having a good time at Kalona Fall Festival in 1998, she decided to give it a go.

“I was inspired to try it, both by watching the corn being freshly ground, and by my husband, who fondly remembers his mother’s fried mush,” she told readers in her Kalona News column. She provided the following recipe:

Fried Cornmeal Mush

1 c. cornmeal

1 tsp. salt

1 c. milk

3 c. water

Bring water to a boil. Make a paste with cornmeal, salt and milk. Add to boiling water, stirring until it returns to a boil. Reduce heat and cook for 15-20 minutes, stirring occasionally. Pour into a deep baking dish and let cool. Slice 1/4 “ thick and fry on griddle or in skillet until golden brown on both sides. Serve with molasses or maple syrup.

Local eateries haven’t given up on fried mush either.

Although now gone, the Kalonial Townhouse Restaurant served “unusual items” including fried corn meal mush under the ownership of Marland and Lora Shetler. The Kalona Bakery dished out fried mush, liverwurst and scrapple.

Today JW’s Foods offers Homemade Fried Mush solo or with liverwurst during breakfast hours. Dutch Country Table offers cornmeal mush with maple syrup as an item called “Marlin’s Choice,” something owner Marlin Bontrager did not originally plan for the menu, but customers demanded. It’s made using his mom’s recipe.

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Let’s face it: the words ‘fried’ and ‘mush’ have such poor connotations that a culinary dish by that name is never going to sound delicious to those who have never tried it. But like a threadbare teddy bear that has seen you through the highs and lows of childhood, for many, fried mush is comfort and nostalgia on a plate.